The Crazies – If the zombies don’t kill you the soldiers will.
The Crazies – If the zombies don’t kill you the soldiers will.
Rated: R Time: 1:41
Stars: Timothy Olyphant, Radha Mitchell, Danielle Panabaker, Joe Anderson and others
Final Grade: C
Sheriff David Dutton (Olyphant) is getting ready to have a really bad day. Unknown to him, a top secret military plane carrying a really toxic biological substance has crashed into a swamp which forms the headwaters of the river from which his city gets their water supply from. The toxin has seeped into the town’s water supply and is turning the citizens into homicidal zombies. Can a plot get any less creative than this?
Our first introduction to the zombies is in the form of the town drunk during a high school baseball game as he totes his shotgun accross center field and slowly walks toward the pitchers mound. You can tell by his look that this is going to be another horror flick. He doesn’t make it and is shot somewhere in center field.
Meanwhile, the town doctor, who happens to be Dutton’s wife ( Mitchell) is perplexed by a catatonic patient in her office that seems to stare into space and is basically looking like death on two feet. But, she sends him home and orders a CAT scan. I love what passes for modern medicine in the movies nowadays.
As you would expect, only the sheriff has a clue what’s going on in the big picture. The mayor is too politically correct to address issues and by then, well the military is involved and it would appear that everyone in the city is doomed for extinction to control the spread of the illness. Realizing their deaths are imminent, mixed with major league graphical zombie death, blood and gore, the Sheriff, wife, deputy and the doctor’s assistant start their survival trek of running to escape their own most certain demise from the US Army, if not from the marauding zombies.
If you’re hoping for something like Andromeda Strain, well, you’re going to be very substantially disappointed.
Crazies is a remake of a 1973 of the same name by George Romero, director of Night of the Living Dead and other zombie flicks. It’s not as gross as Living Dead, but it’s still really gross.
What differentiates Crazies from most zombie films is that these zombies seem to still retain some of their higher thought functions and are capable of making conscious decisions, albeit homicidal ones. Frankly, I’ve never understood how it is that zombies with half their heads missing could still understand how to walk across a field, invade a house, eat the inhabitants and still be able to be shot and killed by a gun or hatchet. I guess that’s just more Hollywood license with reality.
If you like zombie flicks, then perhaps you can stomach this one. Pun intentional. But, if not, I don’t think anyone’s going to blame you for sitting it out.
I’m Don Rima, and that’s the way I saw it, From Where I Stand.
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